Penumbra: Black PlagueReview

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Confirming what we all suspected: Greenland is a place of great evil.

By Charles Onyett

In adventure games there are only so many times you can strap a cell phone to a cat to distract an NPC before you jump up, swat aside your monitor, and bellow "Blast! This doesn't make sense!" at an unsuspecting family member or roommate. It took a while for developers to hear the cries of sheer bewilderment and disorientation from their faithful player base, and thankfully those pleas' sonic reverberations jiggled through the Earth's particles and into the minds of Frictional Games when they started planning the Penumbra series. The follow up to Overture, Black Plague is the second and final Penumbra game, and the better of the two.

Perhaps the best part about Black Plague is, quite simply, that the puzzles generally make sense. Use a lighter on a barrel of oil to set it on fire. Put a coin in a pop machine to get a can. Soak a cloth in alcohol to make if flammable. I'm getting pretty fed up with adventure games that try to tell a story, but then fracture all sense of pacing and continuity by forcing you to spend hours running between locales, trying to figure out how dials in one room are affected by punching keypads and manipulating jigsaw puzzles in another. As you sneak your way toward uncovering the Shelter's true nature and what lies beyond, you might get tripped up here and there by puzzles, but even if you're stumped the eventual solution won't strike you as unintuitive for the sake of padding gameplay hours. One issue with making the puzzles more coherentis, by the end, it feels as though not enough was done with the physics-focused adventure to really stand out, or really wow you. Some of the puzzles are fairly pedestrian and tend to repeat themselves, the valves and switches in particular. Even so, it's a far less frustrating experience than with more traditional point-and-click adventure games.

The physics provide a solid hook. You wander around in a first-person perspective snatching up boxes, rolling barrels, and opening drawers to find keys, flashlight batteries, and glow sticks. Instead of just clicking on a drawer, though, you click a button to grab on, then actually have to mimic a pulling motion with the mouse (or move backwards while holding on) to open it. With valves you actually have to make a circular motion, with levers you have to pull them down, and with doors you have to push them open like you would in real life (meaning push on the outer edge of the door, not the hinges, dummy). Now I don't want to say every game out there needs to let me open doors realistically to be interesting, but in an adventure game like this that relies on a sense of atmosphere and immersion, little things like this make me feel more rooted in the game world and more connected with my surroundings. Black Plague, like Overture, doesn't deliver on this mechanic flawlessly, but it does make improvements.

First off, you don't have to fight dog patrols like you did in the Overture. There are grotesque roaming enemies, but they're relatively infrequent and easy to disregard. Without the threat of dogs jumping on your face, the puzzles tend to be more enjoyable. The physics system works just fine when you've got time to assess the situation, but its limitations and awkwardness come screaming to the forefront whenever you're suddenly dropped into a twitch situation. Trying to fight things with pickaxes in the first was one of my major problems, since the fighting system was an unwieldy mess. Here you don't get any weapons and there are only a handful of instances I can think of when twitch elements are thrust upon you, though I won't go into them because, well, spoiling things isn't very sporting.

The narrative still proves to be clumsy at times, but there a few things at work in Black Plague's story that make it more digestible than Overture. First off, since you're already embroiled in the mystery of the Shelter, you don't have to deal with Overture's flimsy exposition and implausible justification for protagonist Philip to suddenly interrupt his life and risk everything to visit a remote area of Greenland. Frictional built in another mechanic that toys with your sense of perception, heightening the already powerful atmosphere that exists here. I don't want to give too much away, but essentially it forces you second-guess that what you see and hear is a reality – if only it had been developed to a greater extent and utilized in more creative ways.

From looking at screenshots of this game, you may have been affected with a pang of nausea. And no, that's not because the screenshots feature horrific beasts dripping with filth, but instead because the graphics are so damn ugly. And they are, for sure, but don't let that turn you away from this game. While the bland environments and general lack of detail won't impress you in any way, the game still manages to weave dread and foreboding into its atmosphere, a feat which many flashier games fail to achieve. Part of it could be because the graphics are so dark, but for me the atmosphere was threaded together by the combination of perspective, soundtrack, and the physics, as well as a few more off-beat sequences, such as one video similar to an orientation film from Lost's Dharma Initiative. Sequences where Philip has to strap on a gas mask, limiting vision to a tiny section of the screen, forcing you to plunge into darkened areas of the unknown with flashlight, flare, or glow stick made for some harrowing experiences. Combine that with the harsh rasps of breath through the mask's filter and scratches in the mask's see-through plastic and it's even more affecting, even if the wall textures make you think you've downed a handle of vodka.

Oh, and as with any game like this, do not play it in a bright room. Turn off the lights and make sure you're alone – it's better that way. If you're one of those gamers who siphons pride from your confident resilience against fear when it comes to movies or games, you're still going to jump a few times while playing through this one. Granted these moments are a cheaper sort of scare as ghoulish things spring suddenly from shadows, but considering the game's already unnerving atmosphere, they don't feel as hackneyed as in other games that try similar mechanics.

The Verdict

If you're one of those who grimaces and / or scoffs when somebody suggests you should play an adventure game, try to swallow your pride for a second and give this game a shot. Without the awkward combat of Overture, Black Plague is a smoother experience where the clumsiness of the physics and control systems are exposed far less frequently. Though you'll be a little lost at Black Plague's outset, if you're only going to pick one of these two this is the one to go with; it'll make sense eventually.

Should you decide to dive in, be prepared for an engaging ride through a Lovecraftian gauntlet of horrors, enjoyable puzzles, eerie ambient tracks, and an immersive, disquieting atmosphere. While much of Black Plague and the Penumbra games in general isn't wholly novel and shrouded in a cloud of low production values, it is most definitely refreshing.

7PresentationStandard delivery of narrative and pulled off effectively. An added dimension of storytelling casts doubt on the reality of what you see, which works well, though it's limited in its implementation.